User:Kaleawatts/Kara Walker

Lead
Kara Elizabeth Walker (born November 26, 1969) is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, printmaker, installation artist, filmmaker, and professor who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1997, at the age of 28, becoming one of the youngest ever recipients of the award. She has been the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University since 2015.

Walker is regarded as among the most prominent and acclaimed Black American artists working today.

Process: Silhouette Installations
Walker is most widely known for her immersive site-specific installations. Walker plays and almost blurs the lines between types of art forms. Her installations could be fluid between visual art and performance art. Elements of her installations like the theatrical staging or the life-size cut figurines contribute to and somewhat evoke this performative behavior. As Walker has mentioned before, she focuses more on the ideas and concepts behind the artwork rather than focusing on the initial aesthetic and visual aspect of the artwork, creating more of a conceptual outlook.

Moreover, Shelly Jarenski discusses Waker’s art in the context of panoramas. For background context, panoramas were very popular in the nineteenth century and were used as a form of entertainment. They usually depicted historical scenes or vast landscapes. Walker’s work demonstrates that the aesthetic experiences embedded in the panorama (though those experiences are rooted in the particular contexts of the nineteenth century) persist as a concern in African American art, just as the social consequences of slavery and the racial narratives that structured it persist in shaping our contemporary cultural narratives of race and space. Walker's work also provides a second visual example of the way panoramas can affect spectators, since it is a continual struggle for contemporary scholars to apprehend the visuality of panoramas, given that written sources are often all that survive in the historical archive. When viewing Walker’s panoramas, they are illustrative of past events or depictions of the enslavement of African Americans. Her ability to combine devices that were used in the past and recontextualize with the sinful scenes she creates in her large-scale installations deconstructs the aesthetic of these installations. As Jarenski mentioned in her article, Walker’s panoramas provide a visual example of how her panoramas affect the viewers which is different from 19th-century panoramas which were limited to written sources. Walker’s installations are able to create a contemporary visual interpretation and reinforce one of the themes of panoramas; depict historical events. Thus, further shedding light and interconnectedness on the artistic process and the final artistic output.

Kara Walker once explained her artistic process as “two parts research and one part paranoid hysteria,” a description that captures the entanglement of history and fantasy that pervades her work. In that sense, through the process of Walker creating her art, 2/3 of it has to do with logical analysis, research, and other rational minded resources. While on the other hand, she suggests a component of rational fear or paranoia. Even despite the rational aspect, there's a sense of uneasiness and complexity that ties and illustrates itself through her work.